“Gone, I think.” Nona spat and rose to her knees.
What does she mean, where is it? Keot sounded weak, distant, he shivered over the very surface of her skin.
She means, where is it?
That was it. Holothour have nothing so primitive as flesh.
“I think it’s gone.” Nona helped Ara up, raising her fingers to the scrape on Ara’s forehead. “You’re all right?”
“You should see the other girl.” Ara managed a grin. It was an old joke.
“I see what you mean.” Jula tapped her frying pan to the wall where Ara had collided with it, and more layers of stone cracked away.
Ara scooped up the lantern. “Come on.”
She led them back.
“Where are all the bones?” Ara held the lantern high. The cavern floor lay clear of anything but rocks and stalagmites. Further back something large and circular loomed.
“Were the skeletons part of it? Like the fear?” Ruli whispered. “In our heads?”
“There’s one here.” Jula pointed at a limed skeleton sprawled between two rocks. “Just the one, like those two in the niche. The rest were illusion?”
Nona turned towards the object at the limits of the lantern light and advanced with Ara. It was a ring, four yards across, standing upright with the lowest part of it buried in the stone floor. The ring itself was the thickness of a roof beam and covered in flowstone, stalagmites and stalactites decorating the top of the arch.
“What is it?” Jula stopped and they all stopped with her.
“Something the Missing left,” Nona said.
“No?” Ruli looked at her, round-eyed.
“Anyone could have put it here,” Jula said. “The people who built the pillars.”
“Sister Rule said it takes two hundred years for a stalactite to grow an inch,” Nona said. “How long would you say those were?”
“Two feet? Three?” Ruli stepped closer.
“That’s the best part of ten thousand years since someone knocked them off last.” Nona advanced too, her voice a whisper. “We should push on.” She looked past the ring to the back of the cavern where two tunnels led off, one rising, one falling. “Which way, Jula?”
“Shouldn’t we . . .” Jula returned her gaze to the ring.
“It’s been there forever. I need to see where Hessa died.” She saw the others’ doubt. “It’s the key to finding Yisht and recovering the shipheart,” she added, with more confidence than she felt.
“That one.” Jula nodded towards the tunnel heading up.
Ara led off, touching her fingers to her forehead every now and then. “Did you . . . come back for me?” she muttered as Nona came close.
“I tripped over you.”
They walked on in silence.
Your friends will get you killed. I don’t understand why you need them. Keot ran along the veins of her right arm, faint and petulant. Especially the other two. They’re weak. There’s no gain.
Nona thought about it. About the ties that bound her to those she had named her friends. Sister Pan’s words returned to her, how she described the Path and the threads that bound each thing to every other thing, a web of influence and dependence, invisible, eternal, ever-changing.
I’ve been at this convent five years, Keot, and I’ve learned to believe in something more than myself. All this time Wheel has been banging on about the Ancestor, about all those who came before and have gone beyond. But the larger thing I believe in is what’s here and now. Those novices are my friends and I would die for them. I would face a terror for them that I haven’t the courage to stand against on my own behalf.
* * *
• • •
EVEN WITH JULA’S instinct for finding her way below ground, making progress still proved a difficult business. Time and again they had to double back, seeking alternative routes where a passage grew too narrow or too steep or turned and led away into the depth of the Rock. It felt to Nona like days, and was perhaps hours.
“I think we’re getting close,” Jula said.
“I think we’re running out of oil.” Ara held the lantern up and shook it to hear the slosh.
“Five more minutes.” Jula pointed ahead with her Noi-Guin knife. “We risked our lives to come this far! We might not get another chance.”
“If we lose our light we can still die down here,” Ara said, but she followed on.
At the limit of their illumination the tunnel before them narrowed then opened into what might be a sizeable chamber. Nona had no idea where they were with respect to the convent but Jula’s talent for navigation had proved trustworthy so far.
The sound of running water greeted them, the air thick with the smell of earth and rot.
“What are those?” Ara raised the lantern and stepped into the chamber.
“I don’t know.” Nona stared at the ceiling. Strange stalactites hung in twisting profusion, like nothing they had seen before.
“They’re roots,” Ruli said.
“We’re below the centre oak.”
Nona kept her gaze on the mass of roots. Towards the rear of the cavern they stretched to the ground and snaked across it. Just feet ahead of her roots reached so low she could almost touch one with a raised arm. For years she had walked the novice cloister, chased the others, sat on the benches chattering, and all that time this void had waited in darkness only yards beneath them. Perhaps people were like that too: a void had waited behind Clera’s smile, a dark space where unspoken thoughts had festered and grown into betrayal.
“Look . . .” Ara stood at the side of the chamber beside one of five round, dark openings. Now she held her lantern closer Nona could see that the opening looked hand-hewn and that corroded iron bars blocked it off. The novices gathered beside Ara.
“It’s a cell.” Ruli pulled on one of the bars. Her hand came away thick with rust.
“Check the others,” Jula said.
They were all cells. Each a space hewn just two yards back into the rock, sealed with bars and a locked gate. The second and third held bones, complete skeletons, blackened with age.
“This is a prison,” Nona whispered, remembering the recluse, the cave where she and the abbess had been kept before their trial.
“An oubliette.” Jula’s voice was a whisper too. “They put people here to forget them.”
“Those skeletons we found . . .” Ruli frowned.
“Might not have been people who came into the caves and got lost. They might have been novices or sisters who escaped the cells but never saw the light again.” Nona tried to imagine it. Rotting away down here just yards beneath the novice cloisters where girls ran and laughed and played. Nothing but the stillness of rock and root. She suppressed a shudder. A place to forget. Did anyone in the convent still remember it existed?
To one side of the cavern in a low-roofed alcove a pool nestled, fed by a small stream escaping a crack.
“In the ceiling.” Nona pointed. A circular shaft led up.
“What’s in it?” Ara squinted. She crouched at the pool’s edge holding the lantern above the water. The light’s reflection on the rocky ceiling made a wonder of slowly shifting patterns.
“Is that . . . a bucket?” Nona frowned and squinted at something hanging in the shaft.
“It’s the well!” Jula said.
“The well?” Nona didn’t know of a well close to the novice cloisters.
“In the back of the laundry. That little room . . . They get the washing water there when the rain barrels are dry.”
Nona wondered if those trapped in the cells might sometimes have heard the outside world echoing down the well shaft. She shuddered again.
“We need to go now,” Ara said. “Or we’ll be feeling our way in the dark.”
With new meaning attached to the old bones along the way, the novices needed no further encouragement. They left without a word.
14
ABBESS GLASS
ABBESS GLASS STOOD in the shadow beside her study w
indow, watching the novices of Red Class hurry towards Academia Tower, clutching their slates. She rubbed Malkin behind the ears. The old cat tolerated this and watched with her. At the back of the class little Elsie, just eight years old, scurried to catch up. She had been given over to the convent by her mother, a metalworker recently widowed and struggling to keep her younger children housed and fed.
A sigh escaped her. Able had been eight when he died. Her son would have been a man now, perhaps with children of his own. It still hurt to think of it, a physical ache in her chest. Glass struck her breastbone, willing the pain away, and turned from the window.
Sister Tallow waited before the portrait of Abbess Mace, she of the miracle. Abbess Glass had forgotten the nun was there and noticed her with a start. Tallow showed no more motion than the portrait. If not for the wisp of her breath escaping in the cold air she might have been just another painting. Though it would take quite an artist to capture her hardness and the dark intensity of her eyes.
“It won’t be long before the inquisitors want to read the Grey reports, you know that.” Sister Tallow glanced towards the door. “I’m surprised there’s not a watcher in your house yet.”
Abbess Glass gave a grim smile. “Brother Pelter has suggested it. I declined.”
“And the Grey reports?”
“I doubt they will prove of much use to the Inquisition.”
“Encryption’s no good. They’ll just demand the cipher,” Sister Tallow said.
“Even so.” Abbess Glass spread her hands.
“You could appeal to Nevis. He could still get them out of here,” Tallow said. “Before they get their teeth into . . . anything.”
“Ah, sister.” Abbess Glass reached out to pat Tallow’s shoulder. The nun stiffened but let the familiarity pass. She wasn’t much different to Malkin in that respect. “Don’t you teach the girls that sometimes you have to let your opponent get a good tight grip before you can use it against them?”
“As a last resort, abbess. It’s better to get the grip yourself.”
Abbess Glass shrugged then shivered. “The Durns are landing again, in force, spreading along the southern margins. The Scithrowl armies are at both their borders, though more of them at the one we care about. The ice has advanced another mile since last year’s ranging, on both fronts. The emperor is squeezed on all sides. Our options are running out at a startling rate, old friend. All we need now, as they say, is for the moon to fall!”
“And Sister Kettle?” Sister Tallow moved to the window. She stood, staring across the convent. “She’s not safe here. Pelter will snap her up. I’m surprised he hasn’t already. And what Apple might do then I couldn’t say. Only that it would not be pretty.”
“I need Kettle here.”
“But—”
“Too many of the Greys are on missions. The things I’ve set in motion . . . The uncertainties . . . Sister Kettle is my reserve. Her skills are too valuable to waste, her condition a good excuse to keep her close.”
“It’s her condition that will see Pelter take her off to the Tower of Inquiry in chains, abbess!”
“The operative word there is ‘see,’ Tallow dear. He will not see her. She will remain hidden but close.”
“And this business with Nona? Shade Trial in the cloister?”
“Nona is Red to her core. She was never going to pass the trial, not in Thaybur Square, not here. It will do her no harm to fail at something. We all have to get used to that. Even me.”
A knock at the door.
“Come.”
Sister Spoon leaned in through the doorway, the Ancestor’s tree dangling from her neck in the form of a silver pendant, branches above, a single taproot reaching below. “Sister Rock says there are pilgrims massing on the Vinery Stair, calling for the Argatha.”
“I’m sure Novice Zole will be delighted. What do you mean by ‘massing,’ sister?” Abbess Glass waved to Sister Tallow, letting her go; there would be a class of girls wanting instruction on how better to beat each other senseless.
“Hundreds, abbess.” Sister Spoon stepped aside to let Sister Tallow leave. “There are said to be food riots in the Verity slums. People want reassurance. They want the Argatha!”
“Unfortunately we have Zole.” Abbess Glass folded her arms across her stomach. “Have Sister Wheel go down and preach at the crowd. An hour or two of that should clear them.” She chewed her lip. “Send some bread down to feed any that are in real need. Children first. Take it along the Cart Way and serve it out on the Verity Road. That way the food’s associated with leaving rather than with waiting on our doorstep.”
“Yes, abbess.” Sister Spoon withdrew. Malkin slinked out at her heels. An appointment with a rat somewhere, no doubt.
The door closed and Abbess Glass found herself looking at the portrait that she had for a moment imagined Sister Tallow might be part of. “Abbess Mace.” She hadn’t seen the faces of any of the portraits in this room for a long time. Years maybe. They had become part of a fixed background, something for the eye to slide across. There were lessons to be learned there. Though little time remained for lessons. She had told Sister Tallow that all they needed was for the moon to fall. Of course the secret whispered in the corridors of power was that it had been falling all her lifetime and that fall was only getting faster. “What we need from you now, Abbess Mace, is another miracle.” She made a slow turn, taking in the dozen former abbesses whose faces watched her from the walls. “Anyone?”
Abbess Glass returned to her post at the window. Brother Pelter stood at the doorway to the Ancestor’s dome, letting the ice-wind gust past him into the foyer while he stared up at the abbess’s house.
“Come along, brother.” Abbess Glass set her fingers to the cold panes before her in their leaded diamonds. “Play your part.”
15
“WHAT ARE YOU reading?”
“Kettle! I didn’t hear you come in.” Nona turned from the heavy tome, grinning. She’d worried that Kettle had gone off on another mission without saying goodbye. There had been no sign of her around the convent for days.
“I can be light on my feet when I need to be.” Kettle leaned over Nona’s shoulder. “Saint Devid?”
“It says here that he travelled the whole circle of the Corridor.” Nona placed her bookmark on the page. “That was five hundred years ago. It was over two hundred miles from the northern ice to the southern ice back then!”
“Not one I’ve heard of.” Kettle raised her eyebrows. “Impressive though!”
“He visited three cities left abandoned by the Missing too! The ice has swallowed them now though . . .”
“Sister Wheel will hate him.” Kettle grinned. “She can’t abide stories about the Missing. She says they were animals, nothing more. The Church’s official position is that they had no links to the Ancestor’s tree. Which makes them animals in a technical sense. But you don’t find many horses building themselves a city!”
“Saint Devid came from the Grey too, like me. I don’t mean like a Grey Sister . . . the same place as me. And it wasn’t the Grey back then either, it was some of the best farmland in the empire and they had a city there—a big town anyway called . . .” Nona started to turn back in search of the name.
“Have you thought about how you’re going to pass the Shade Trial, Nona Grey?” Sister Kettle rolled Nona’s last name around her mouth as if savouring it.
Nona snorted. “You know it’s happening in the cloister, yes? I’ve got to sneak past Joeli and the rest of Mystic Class unchallenged. Perhaps if I wear a hat and cape . . . And then climb the centre oak, unchallenged, and reach the puzzle-box. After that all I have to do is hide in the branches with every leaf tight-wrapped against the ice wind, and sit there long enough to open it. Unchallenged.”
“Sounds difficult.”
“Sounds impossible. Even if I could still work the shadows.”
“There’s more to the Grey than wrapping yourself in shadow. Apply yourself to the problem, nov
ice.” Kettle smiled and patted Nona’s shoulder. “I have faith.”
* * *
• • •
NONA STAYED AT the library taking notes on Saint Devid, absorbed by the tales of his wandering. Somehow Bray’s voice contrived to wash over her without breaking her concentration. As a result she arrived at Blade inky-fingered and late.
“Novice, nice of you to join us.” Sister Tallow looked around as Nona creaked the doors open, icy-gusts lifting her habit around her. The rest of the class were paired on the sands, swords at the ready. “Novice Joeli can shave your head after the bell. I feel she should get to wield a blade this lesson.” She nodded to where Joeli sat on the sidelines, her cane to one side, golden hair boiling around her shoulders, brushed to a high shine.
Nona gritted her teeth and ran for the stores to get a weapon.
The rest of the lesson passed in a flickering blur of swordplay, Alata gratefully surrendering her place opposite Zole to Nona. The pair of them fought with dedication, Zole precise, relentless and without mercy just as usual, Nona finding her instinctive fear of sharpened steel pushed out by anger at the humiliation waiting for her under Joeli’s hands. With the prospect of the Namsis girl holding a cut-throat razor inches from her face, Nona found Zole armed with a sword a less intimidating prospect.
“Good.” Sister Tallow’s voice inserted itself into a gap in their sparring.
Zole and Nona paused, both panting. Mistress Blade used the g-word so rarely that the moment required witnessing. Nona realized she was dripping with sweat and saw that Zole’s blade-habit was stained red around the site of her last thrust, the blunted point of her blade having penetrated deep enough to make the ice-triber bleed. Looking down, Nona saw she sported two similar injuries.
“Hah!” Zole launched another attack.
Nona dived into the space between heartbeats, deep as she had ever been. Even so the fight seemed blindingly fast, swords clashing, parrying, twisting, the sharp adjustment of feet, the stuttering advances and retreats. Their blades met perhaps twenty times before Zole dropped into an unexpected leg-swipe. Nona jumped it, almost. They crashed together, snarling, blades crossed between them, both pressing close. And leapt apart, feet bracing to rush in once again, sand piling up behind them.
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